Number Agents

 Reading back over this blog, I realised I have never shared our journey into creating a school culture based on 'understanding.'   After listening to the radio segment yesterday and sharing it on my facebook page, I thought it was fitting to do a bit of a post, like many of my posts, it isn't short, but hopefully it may spark some thought, or at least give some affirmation to those on a similar journey. Background... Like all of our journeys,  it all started with play.  At the time when we started to plant the seeds of our future school culture, I really didn't realise how significant our play pedagogy would be, but as it turns out, like just about everything else we do, it ultimately it all does come back to play and understanding the brain. We had already worked hard on being developmentally aware, changing this lens to developmentally sensitive and responsive.  We understood the difference of 'chronological age' and 'actual age', understood how play ...

Some initial thoughts... I wanted to start this 'last' blog post around the pillars, by clearly saying although the visual represents the different components as independent, they of course are/should all taught in an interactive way.  Vocabulary, should of course be taught in the context of comprehension and as I have added to the bottom of the pillars, rests on a bed of oral language (expressive and receptive) and background knowledge. I would not want anyone to think that we would teach these components as seperate and it is also important to understand that comprehension is one of the most complicated things we do on a daily basis and it does not only happen in the context of reading.  Narrowly focusing on reading, as it is presented in the visual, is not useful to anyone. I have taken this straight from the transcript of the podcast I have linked to this post. "Comprehension is not a skill that you can learn how to do it and then apply it to different contexts, becaus...

  This is the next instalment in blog posts around the 'pillars of literacy' and unpacking what this looks like in a real classroom. If you have read any of my posts, you will know I am a massive advocate for whole class teaching.  When I say whole class teaching, what I mean is quality tier one teaching for the whole class, done together, without groups. Obviously I still work with groups or individuals as needed, but this is much more fluid and dependent on the exact need at the time. This blog post touches on the code, the teaching of phonics, encoding (taking the sound to print) and spelling, learning the rules and applying them. In the past (before I developed an understanding of a scope and sequence) I did of course teach phonics, in fact we did a bit of everything, it was all very balanced.  While we did our best, I can see why this pick n mix approach, with little thought of the why and the what, did many of our children little favour.   I did a lot of '...

"To read at reasonable pace, with good accuracy and appropriate expression" Fluency is not about reading as fast as you can. ----- When I set out on my 'structured literacy' journey, it may as well have been called 'structured reading.'  At the time, I saw it as a change to how I taught reading, replacing this (what I was doing) with that (what I would do informed by the research.) Don't get me wrong, it did make a massive impact straight away and it was a huge journey, but I was looking to replace my practice with a neat bow and it simply doesn't work like that. We changed to a scope and sequence, we became much more explicit and the books we were using became decodable, but despite the changes, I knew I was missing the boat, there had to be more to the Science than this.   And so, I did another deep dive, I have reflected a lot about that deep dive (of which I am currently on) through this blog and in particular this recent series around literacy. I ...